Feb. 6, 2006
9:47 a.m.
This is a brief P.S. to my previous message, saving someone else the trouble of pointing it out :-)
However, very few TLD labels are words in specific languages. The ccTLD labels are deliberately restricted to a list of codes, and of the few labels in the gTLD 'vocabulary' that actually appear in the English dictionary, not all are defined there in the sense that the label is being presented to users.
A few of the ccTLD labels also happen to be words in one or another language. Similarly, others have strong mnemonic associations external to their intended purpose. These generate TLD policy considerations all of their own which (as should surprise nobody) will become massively more complex when the TLD space is IDNified. /Cary